The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

Extreme weather is MUCH juicier. We have had extreme weather events forever but people's memory of them is vague and people can easily be persuaded that recent events are anomalous. Studies of weather statistics show we are having FEWER EWEs lately but who needs statistics when you've got models?

Since the data are so pesky, however, even the modelers are having a struggle to justify their conclusions. It was all hanging out at a recent IPCC modelers meeting and Michael Kile fisks their agonizing ably below

Dr Peter Stott is now head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. He was in Hobart in mid-January for the IPCC’s WG1-AR5 fourth Lead Author Meeting, with 254 other scientists from 39 countries. They met to “consider comments received during the Expert and Government Review of the Second Order Draft”.

As discussed previously, the global climate “conversation” has become all about EWE risk and “the odds of events.” Stott made this clear in a nine-minute ABC RN interview.

Stott: “You can’t say that a particular event - a particular heatwave or particular drought was definitely caused – or not caused – by climate change [ie: DACC, DAGW]. But what you can do is look at how the odds of events has changed. Is CC changing the odds, or making particular types of weather events more or less likely?”

ABC: You say event-attribution is an emerging science. How do you quantify how much is due to AGW as opposed to natural climate variability?

Stott: “You need to look very carefully at the observations. Then you need to use climate models to calculate the contribution which can be attributable to human influence, as opposed to natural variability. So what you are really trying to do is to detect the fingerprint of human influence and to distinguish it from other factors....

...What you are seeking to do is to compare the probability of having a heat-wave in a particular region as it exists at present with the probability we would have had if we had not changed the climate....

...It is also important to point out that not all of these EWEs will be shown to have had a significant contribution from climate change [ie: DAGW, DACC]. Many of them will, but some of them also will be attributed more to the natural variability of the climate.”

But can climate models ever determine accurately the AGW contribution attributable to human influence, as opposed to natural variability? Is there something fishy going on here? What is the probability that climate changes all by itself?

Stott: “What we have done in this brand-new report is to gather analyses; to have looked at some EWEs of the previous year and put them in the context of climate variability and change.”

Stott’s “brand-new report” -- a research paper in the Bulletin of American Meteorological Society, Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective -- had received, he said, “a very, very positive response from the scientific community ... the first example of near-real time attribution of a number of important extreme events occurring in one year.”

Stott did not mention the uncertainty monster during the interview, but he did admit that “to carry out such analyses and to make sure they are peer-reviewed and robust, this is really stretching the ability of the science and the scientists.”

His BAMS paper was more emphatic, stressing that “explaining the causes of specific extreme events in near-real time is severely stretching the current state of the science.” Nevertheless, he hoped this would the first of many annual EWE reports.

The IPCC, not surprisingly, agrees with him: “Extreme climate events can cause widespread damage and have been projected [not predicted] to become more frequent as the world warms”. But even it admitted last year that “it is often not clear which extremes matter the most, and how and why they are changing” (IPCC interdisciplinary workshop, 2012).

Another joint-authored paper -- Attribution of Weather and Climate-related Extreme Events -- presented to the 2011 World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) conference, gives a revealing glimpse inside the EWE sausage – and it sure ain’t pretty. Event attribution, we learn, is a very tricky business. Yet despite big challenges, such as whether “causal factors [for climate events and extremes] can be identified and model deficiencies addressed,” Stott insists that further ACE research “could lead to improved predictions of such events in the future.”

Attribution seems to come down to a dodgy three-way bet -- and loaded dice.

Here’s the bet: “Human influences have increased the risk of some extreme weather- and climate-related events, reduced the risk of others and, for some may not have affected the risk substantially”. Whatever the outcome, Team ACE can explain it away.

Here are the loaded dice: “A finding that human influence has not contributed substantially to the magnitude of a particular EWE may not be incompatible with a finding that human influences substantially altered the odds of such an event happening (especially a particular threshold exceedence).”

Heads I win, tails you lose.

Stott does admit, however, initial studies “highlight many of the challenges still to be faced”, the “considerable uncertainties that remain”, the uncertainty around alleged “causal links” and “whether relevant processes are captured adequately” by models.

One of them will be required reading in the “de-biasing” gulags proposed by pro-AGW social psychologists and purveyors of what might be called Lewandowsky Logic. It argues that “some cold events are consistent with the inter-play of on-going global warming and internal variability”.

A research group (Perlwitz et al) studied the “very cool 2008 climate conditions” in North America that “diverted strongly from the long-term warming trend observed over previous years”. Their “suite of model experiments” apparently “showed that an anthropogenic warming of North American temperature was overwhelmed by a particularly strong bout of naturally induced cooling resulting from the continent’s sensitivity to widespread coolness of the tropical and north-eastern Pacific sea surface temperatures.”

The study’s implications:

“...that the cool year in 2008 did not indicate that the climate was likely to embark upon a prolonged period of cooling and, on the contrary, the pace of North American warming was more likely to resume in coming years.”

As they say, go figure!

Stott’s concluding comments are also revealing: “While it is possible for an attribution service [such as ACE] to provide quantitative results, it is much harder to provide carefully validated results that include sufficient well-calibrated information that would enable a user to fully understand the capabilities and limitations of the information provided.” Needless to say, “in the interim it will be important to manage expectations."

In other words, don’t expect too much from us anytime soon.

Future “progress” apparently depends on – inter alia – “effective communication of attribution results, including remaining uncertainties”. Given we are told they are considerable, why do we rarely hear about them? It may be “effective” for ACE, but is it being economical with the truth?

No surprise, then, to discover even the UN-funded WCRP describes the quest for an atmospheric El Dorado - a “science underpinning the prediction and attribution of extreme events” - as a "Grand Challenge". Indeed, so much of a challenge that for David Karoly – who was at Team Ace’s foundation meeting four years ago in Boulder, Colorado – WCRP’s ambitious “climate information service” concept is only at "first draft" stage and still “needs consultation and feedback” from the CLIVAR, ETCCDI, GEWEX, WGSIP and WGCM model groups.

We learn something else from Karoly, too: there are “conceptual difficulties in validating model results against observations, first of all associated with (but not limited to) co-location in space and grid-cell data versus point measurements.”

Furthermore, any “improvements in longer term predictions of changes in the frequency and intensity of EWEs” will require “improved representation of key processes in climate models” and resolution of other complex issues.

When did the orthodoxy’s “authoritative” voice ever stress – or mention publicly - there are “conceptual difficulties” with the very models being used to determine EWE “probabilities”?

When did it reveal that “little is currently known about the predictability of the frequency of daily extremes at long lead times”? Does the political class know – or care - that “much work is needed to take careful account of uncertainty when delivering forecasts of extremes [EWEs] to users”? (Karoly, WGSP, 2012, white paper, I3).

When the word “mystery” appears in a peer-reviewed paper, it is time to sit up and pay attention. Did the 255 scientists in Hobart last month do so? Did they discuss the implications of this paper -The mystery of recent stratospheric temperature trends -- during their one-week IPCC lead author meeting?

If not, they should; for it challenges the orthodoxy’s “settled science” mantra. As blogger Doug Hoffman explained here last month: Imagine part of the atmosphere

“that is literally only 10km from anywhere on Earth, a component of our environment that science thought it understood quite well. Now imagine the embarrassment when a major review in a noted journal finds that previous datasets associated with this component are wrong - and have been wrong for more than a quarter of a century. Yet that is precisely what has happened. The area is the stratosphere. The impact of this report is devastating for climate scientists and atmospheric modellers everywhere.”

Even worse, the paper’s authors concluded “the new data call into question our understanding of observed stratospheric temperature trends and our ability to test simulations of the stratospheric response to emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances.”

Seeking laws of climate-change and attribution? Prepare yourself for a long wait. Some (funded) studies can go on forever. How many climateers can dance on the head of a pin, or tango on the hot-plate of uncertainty? How many other “mysteries” are lurking in the belly of the catastrophist beast?

As The Consensus Among Scientists Crumbles, Global Warming Alarmists Attack Their Integrity

Global warming alarmists are attacking the integrity of scientists, desperately seeking to minimize the damage presented by a recent survey of geoscientists and engineers regarding global warming.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 geoscientists (commonly known as earth scientists) and engineers reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies found that only 36 percent agree with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assertion that humans are causing a serious global warming problem. By contrast, a majority of scientists in the survey believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

Global warming alarmists, desperate to restore the shattered remains of their fictitious global warming consensus, spent the last week in overdrive expressing outrage and attacking the scientists participating in the survey. Their asserted arguments go something like this:

Argument 1

The survey consisted of geoscientists and engineers in Alberta, Canada, which has the highest per capita of geoscientists and engineers in North America. Oil companies and companies in related industries employ many of these geoscientists and engineers. These scientists are therefore biased and do not represent geoscientists and engineers as a whole.

Argument 2

Geoscientists and engineers are not qualified to give an informed opinion on global warming. Only atmospheric scientists are qualified to do so.

Argument 3

The survey takers claim their survey is not strong evidence against the mythical global warming consensus, therefore skeptics cannot cite the survey while debating the mythical consensus.

Let’s address the first two arguments first. These arguments would be plausible, and perhaps might even be persuasive, except that alarmists have been saying exactly the opposite for decades. When alarmists say that scientists can be biased based on their career path, and that only atmospheric scientists are qualified to give informed opinions on global warming, they are engaging in the most laughable form of hypocrisy.

Let’s start with Argument 1.

Skeptics frequently point out that claims of an alarmist global warming consensus rely on tainted, biased participant pools. Donna Laframboise, for example, has documented absurd bias and activism with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where environmental activists drive the IPCC findings in their roles as lead authors. Similarly, I documented how environmental activists directed the findings of a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) global warming report and how nearly all of the 23 NAS authors were already on the record as being global warming alarmists before being chosen to write the report.

Additionally, an often misrepresented survey claiming 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing a global warming crisis (actually, the survey asked merely whether some warming has occurred and whether humans are playing at least a partial role – two questions to which I would answer yes), restricted its participant pool to government scientists and scientists working for institutions dependent on government grants. Scientists who work for – or are funded by – government institutions know that their funding will dry up and their jobs will disappear if and when global warming stops being an asserted crisis.

When skeptics point out these blatant biases, however, alarmists claim that scientists by their very nature are immune from having their environmental activist affiliations, the source of their paychecks or their preexisting advocacy for global warming restrictions influence their research and scientific opinions. Skeptics who call attention to such biases are demonized as “attacking scientists” or “attacking science” itself.

So which is it? Skeptics are willing to play by any set of rules alarmists make, just so long as the rules are consistently applied. Alarmists can’t have it both ways. Scientists’ career choice, salary dependency, and preexisting sociopolitical points of view either taint their objectivity or do not taint their objectivity. They do not taint skeptics’ objectivity while failing to taint alarmists’ objectivity. When alarmists make duplicitous claims to the contrary, they are about as intellectually compelling as Vizzini attempting to divine the location of the poisonous iocane powder in The Princes Bride.

Now let’s address Argument 2.

Skeptics frequently point out how people who have little or no atmospheric science education dominate the IPCC, the NAS report and other so-called “consensus” reports. People without advanced science degrees and degrees in fields other than atmospheric science serve as lead authors for IPCC. Less than a quarter of the authors of the NAS report have degrees relating in any significant way to atmospheric science. Heck, the godfather of global warming alarmism, James Hansen, is an astronomer. The head of the IPCC , Raj Pachauri, is a railroad engineer.

Alarmists claim that their scientists’ lack of in-depth training in atmospheric science does not diminish their authority to speak on global warming issues. Skeptics who point out such shortcomings are, again, accused of attacking scientists or attacking science itself.

There have always been priests and shamans who claim that their rituals can "fix" the weather but there is still nothing that actually works. The wish is mother to the faith, however

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, spoke on Sunday at the “Forward on Climate Rally” in Washington, D.C. He said, “Science should have decided our course long ago.” He was right. If only environmental policy were based on what science really says, billions of dollars would not have been wasted trying to “contain climate change,” as 350.org nonsensically demanded of President Obama this past weekend.

No matter what Mr. McKibben and Al Gore tell us, experts in the field understand that climate science is highly immature. We are in a period of “negative discovery,” in that the more we learn about climate, the more we realize we do not know. This problem is compounded by the fact that much of the data used by campaigners to try to convince the public that we are in an unusual period climatically is either wrong or highly suspect.

Rather than “remove the doubt,” as Mr. Gore tells us should be done, we must recognize the doubt in this, arguably the most complex science ever tackled.

The confidence expressed by Mr. Gore, Mr. McKibben and Mr. Obama that mankind is causing dangerous climate change is a consequence of a belief in what professors Chris Essex (University of Western Ontario) and Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph) call the “Doctrine of Certainty.” This doctrine is “a collection of now familiar assertions about climate that are to be accepted without question” (“Taken by Storm,” 2007).

Mr. Essex and Mr. McKitrick explain, “But the Doctrine is not true. Each assertion is either manifestly false or the claim to know is false. Climate is one of the most challenging open problems in modern science. Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate problem can never be solved.”

Yet, as long ago as 1989, Mr. Gore insisted there was “no dispute worthy of recognition” about the dangers of man-made climate change. Since then, his certainty, and that of the U.N. and most member governments, has solidified into a dogma that few politicians, media, educators or industry leaders dare question.

Yet that dogma is being questioned by more and more reputable scientists who are finally speaking out in an organized fashion. For example, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) shows that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has unjustifiably downplayed research that suggests variations in solar output have far greater impact on global climate than all human activities combined. The NIPCC demonstrates that much of the science being relied upon by governments to create multi-billion dollar climate policies is likely wrong.

Climate change and extreme weather have always happened and always will, no matter what we do. Therefore, instead of foolishly trying to stop them from occurring, we need to adapt to such phenomena by preparing our societies for these inevitable events.

Adaptation measures would include burying electrical cables underground, reinforcing buildings and other infrastructure and preparing for a continuation of sea level rise. We must also ensure reliable, affordable energy so that we have the power to heat and cool our dwellings as needed. For this reason, the president must expand, not shrink, the use of America’s cheapest, most reliable and most abundant energy source — coal — which generates half the country’s electricity. Replacing significant amounts of conventional fossil fuel and nuclear power with intermittent and diffuse sources such as wind and solar power, as groups like 350.org are demanding, is irrational.

It is time to listen to reputable experts who say that, while someday we may be able to meaningfully predict climate, it is not possible now. The science fiction of attempting to actually control global climate through impractical energy policies will simply leave us hungry and freezing in the dark.

That may not be a comforting thought for the thousands who braved the elements to demonstrate on the Mall on Sunday, but that is the true climate reality.

If we think the rises in energy prices have been bad enough already then we need to think again. This, he said, is only the start.

As Mr Buchanan put it, the combination of British power plants closing, foreign gas supplies shrinking and demand for energy rising has tipped us perilously close to the edge. He is simply stating the obvious.

Our energy policy is no longer dictated by the need to keep supply plentiful and cheap which for decades was the basis of all planning. Today energy policy is framed with only one factor in mind: satisfying the green lobby.

It is, to be blunt, mad. Next month we are forcing 10 per cent of our energy production plants to close in order to meet environmental targets.

They are in full working order. No matter. They will be boarded up by order of the state.

There is no starker example of the disconnect between the political classes and the rest of us. For the political classes – all three main parties are as one over this – the only thing that matters is signing treaties on global warming.

They love nothing more than flying off to summits parading their green hearts. Only when they get home does reality strike and we have to start implementing their deals.

Five years ago we lived in a different world. Growth was not just a cherished wish but a reality. For many people climate change was the most pressing problem faced by the world.

And so green treaties seemed prescient – an example, it was proclaimed, of foresight and good stewardship of the planet.

But actions have consequences.

And we are now paying the price of the green lobby persuading governments to rip up decades of energy policy and start again.

Some of the less starry-eyed analysts warned at the time that by 2015 there would be an energy crunch as coal and oil plants were closed to meet EU green energy rules.

Added to that wasteful subsidies for wind power, a minimum price for carbon (due to come into effect on April 1) which would push up prices and the failure to bolster nuclear supplies have all added to the mix. And then came the financial crash.

In the pre-crash world the green obsession might, just, have been manageable if we actually wanted to throw money away on inefficient and unnecessarily expensive energy supplies. But in today’s world it is economic madness.

Energy Secretary Ed Davey thinks rising energy prices are now out of control

"Five years ago we lived in a different world. Growth was not just a cherished wish but a reality. For many people climate change was the most pressing problem faced by the world. "
Not one of the coal or oil plants now being closed needs to shut. The only reason they are being tossed aside is because of our green obligations.

Soaring energy costs are the opposite of what the economy needs as it limps from one quarter to another. We need to reduce the price of energy.

And yet governments – this one and the last – have constructed a new energy system calculated to inflate costs.

What is truly enraging about the perfect storm of energy chaos into which we are now plunging headfirst is that none of it is necessary.

The “fantasy” scenario I sketched above is, you see, no fantasy at all. It is the story of energy prices in the US over the past few years. Two huge economies. Two nations with vast energy needs. One – the US – has chosen to meet those needs and put its people first.

Another – the UK – has chosen the opposite path.

Because as well as saddling ourselves with crippling green commitments we have turned our backs on the new technology and method which has brought about such a revolution in the US: fracking.

In America the extraction of shale gas from rocks (fracking) has transformed everything. In one state alone – Pennsylvania – production of natural gas went from zero to more than the North Sea’s entire output in four years.

Gas prices in the US are now just 20 per cent of the equivalent price of oil.

The International Energy Agency forecasts that the US will overtake Russia as the world’s biggest producer of natural gas by 2015 and by 2020 will produce more oil than Saudi Arabia.

Yet in the UK we let the green lobby sneer at fracking and barely even pay lip-service to its possibilities, at the same time as we close down productive power plants and stand back watching while prices go through the stratosphere.

The political classes have treated the rest of us with contempt.

When Ed Davey says the only way for prices to go is up he is talking, quite simply, nonsense. And he is treating the rest of us as idiots.

British government invests another £37m in electric cars despite only 2,000 being sold last year

The electric car industry was handed a £37million boost by the taxpayer yesterday – even though only 2,300 were sold last year.

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin announced a subsidy for homes and businesses which fit plug-in points for the cars.

It will pay up to three-quarters of the installation costs, which range from £1,000 to £10,000.
Hospitals, police and public bodies may have the full price paid.

The government wants to encourage the ownership of electric cars, such as the Vauxhall Ampera (pictured)

The government wants to encourage the ownership of electric cars, such as the Vauxhall Ampera (pictured)

The news comes amid fears that battery-powered cars are losing their spark with drivers.

Only 3,200 have sold in the last two years – less than 1 per cent of the total market – despite green discounts of £5,000 per car.

In 2012 just 2,237 electric cars were sold and registered for the ‘plug-in car grant’, though that is double the figure of 1,052 in 2011 and a big increase on the 111 in 2010.

Studies show the fear of losing power on the road is a top reason people do not use the vehicles.

Mr McLoughlin announced the subsidy on a visit to Sunderland, where Nissan produces its Leaf electric car. He said he wanted Britain to be a world leader in the electric car industry.

But he rejected criticisms that electric sales were poor because they were only of use in towns, and insisted manufacturers would not be making them if there were not a market for them: ‘They are fantastic cars.’

The new multi-million pound funding package aims to kick-start home and on-street charging, as well as the creation of new charge points for people parking plug-in vehicles at railway stations, by offering subsidies covering up to 75 per cent of the cost of installing the charging points.

Hospitals, the police and other public bodies are set to have the full cost of the installation covered.

The announcement was made at Gateshead College’s Skills Academy for Sustainable Manufacturing and Innovation next to Nissan’s site in Sunderland.

The cash-boost follows a critical report by MP watchdogs in September which said electric car sales are stalling except as ‘subsidised second cars for the rich’ allowing the affluent middle classes to run around town and appear environmentally-friendly. The MP’s report said Government grants were ‘subsidising second cars for affluent households’.

It concluded that despite the £5,000 per car ‘green’ subsidy, electric vehicles have lost their spark and proved too expensive for most motorists. Past failure by ministers to provide enough public plug-in power points also means electric car sales had fallen flat threatening an end to the Government’s electric dreams, said the report by the House of Commons transport Select Committee.

The Department for Transport said the £37million funding for the package comes from the Government’s £400million commitment to increase the uptake of ultra-low emission or ‘green’ vehicles and is available until April 2015.

Installing a charge-point in a home costs about £1,000-£1,500, while rapid chargers can cost around £45,000. A charge-point capable of charging two vehicles at once in residential streets or train stations costs around £10,000.

The full package announced today includes up to £13.5million for a 75per cent grant for homeowners who want domestic charge-point installed at their. There is also an £11million fund for councils in England to install on-street charging for residents who have a plug in vehicle but do not have off-street parking.

Up to £9million is being made available to fund charge-points at railway stations.

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said: ‘This investment underlines the Government’s commitment to making sure that the UK is a world leader in the electric car industry.

‘Plug in vehicles can help the consumer by offering a good driving experience and low running costs. They can help the environment by cutting pollution. And most importantly of all, they can help the British economy by creating skilled manufacturing jobs in a market that is bound to get bigger.’

Business Minister Michael Fallon said: ‘Today’s announcement will make the consumer environment for plug-in vehicles more attractive and, in turn, makes the UK a more compelling place to invest.’

John Martin, Nissan’s senior vice president for manufacturing, said: ‘We are delighted that the UK Government is showing it shares our commitment to the transport of the future.’

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and traders welcomed the move which it said would ‘boost confidence’ in the electric car market.

LORD Christopher Monckton, one of the world's best-known climate change sceptics, breezes into Tasmania today with a warning the Greens are the new totalitarians and Labor is not much better.

Speaking from Melbourne yesterday, the outspoken British peer said there had been no measurable global warming for at least 16 years and quite likely longer, despite increases in carbon dioxide emissions. Lord Monckton said the science was collapsing around the alarmists and ordinary people were angry at the lies that had been told.

He said much of the debate was driven by left-wing politics. "The Greens are too yellow to admit they are reds," he said. "Labor is frighteningly close.

"The totalitarian left thinks they know best how we should live. It's about increasing the ability to interfere in every aspect of our lives, down to the last dim, flickering light bulb."

If the whole world adopted Australia's carbon tax scheme for 10 years, it would cost $317 trillion or 59 per cent of global GDP. This amounted to $45,000 for every person and all it would achieve was to forestall warming by about one sixth of one degree. It would be 36 times more expensive than paying the cost of adaptation to any climate change.

While carbon dioxide did have some effect on temperatures, he believed it was vastly overstated. He dismissed the idea of a scientific consensus as intellectual baby talk. "Science is a matter of verifiable proof. Climate science is much slipperier."

Asked about warming of the sea along Tasmania's East Coast, he said Australia was one of the only places where warm currents had had any effect, but the Great Barrier Reef had experienced no temperature change at all.

Lord Monckton is speaking at the University of Tasmania's Sir Stanley Burbury Lecture Theatre in Hobart tonight at 7.30

Preserving the graphics: Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here and here

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Background

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Warmism is a money-grubbing racket, not science.

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

By John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

WISDOM:

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here .....